KITCHENER — A Kitchener man who had been missing for almost 30 years has been found alive, thanks to a sudden flash of memory, a DNA test and the detective work of a St. Catharines-area social worker.

Edgar Latulip was 21 when he wandered away from his group home in Kitchener in September 1986. His mother, Ottawa's Sylvia Wilson, long ago gave up hope of ever seeing her son alive again.

She worried Latulip, who had developmental delays and functioned at the level of a child, had killed himself or had been killed. The last time she saw him, he was recovering in Kitchener hospital after a suicide attempt. Then last month, a 50-year-old man in St. Catharines suddenly began recalling pieces of his lost identity. He gave a name to his social worker and after a quick search online, alarm bells went off.

"Pieces of his memory started coming back. Then the social worker found something on the Internet that led them to believe this was something more," said Const. Philip Gavin of the Niagara Regional Police.

The man was indeed Latulip — featured in a 2014 Record series on local missing person cases — and his discovery solves one of Waterloo Region's oldest unexplained disappearances.

Det.-Const. Duane Gingerich, one of the Waterloo Regional Police officers who investigated Latulip's disappearance, is thrilled to close the case.

A reported sighting in Hamilton in 1993 gave him hope that Latulip might still be alive, but he knew the odds of a happy ending were slim.

"I had hopes that he was out there somewhere," he said. "For us as investigators, this is great, this is awesome. It's satisfying because most of these cases don't turn out this way. You expect the worst when a person is missing for that period of time."

Police believe Latulip suffered a head injury shortly after taking a bus to Niagara Falls in 1986, which reportedly left him with no memory of who he was.

"It was only recently that these lapses in his memory started to come back," Gingerich said.

"There was enough about it that we thought, 'There's something to this.' "

In January, Latulip came to the St. Catharines police station and provided a voluntary DNA sample. This week, it was revealed that sample matched a family member's DNA on file with the Waterloo Regional Police.

If he wants to meet his family, he'll get that chance.

"He's been informed that match is there and now we're working toward reunification with his family in the near future," Gavin said.

Latulip's mother could not be reached for this story. But police say they want to help her see her son again.

In the meantime, there are so many questions about what happened to Latulip after he went missing all those years ago.

He told police he left Kitchener by bus after he left his group home. At the time, investigators suspected he might have gone to the falls to end his life and his body had simply never been recovered.

"I think he got on a bus, and the bus took him to Niagara Falls, and then he wandered on to St. Catharines. That's when he suffered the head injury. When he kind of woke up, things were a lot different," Gavin said.

"This is a new one for me. I've never seen anything like this before."

In a 2014 interview, his mother said her son's disappearance left a painful hole in her life that couldn't be healed.

"This is always at the back of my mind. Having an answer would mean closure," she said at the time. "When Edgar disappeared, I became quite sick. I had to take a leave of absence from work. I was near a nervous breakdown."